Emacs, XEmacs: Format string vulnerabilities in movemail

Background

GNU Emacs and XEmacs are highly extensible and customizable text editors. movemail is an Emacs utility that can fetch mail on remote mail servers.

Description

Max Vozeler discovered that the movemail utility contains several format string errors.

Impact

An attacker could set up a malicious POP server and entice a user to connect to it using movemail, resulting in the execution of arbitrary code with the rights of the victim user.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All Emacs users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=app-editors/emacs-21.4"

All XEmacs users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=app-editors/xemacs-21.4.15-r3"